Synthesis, electronic and optical properties of Si nanostructures

Abstract

Silicon and silicon oxide nanostructures have been deposited on solid substrates, in an ultra high vacuum (UHV) chamber, by laser ablation or thermal vaporization. Laser ablation followed by substrate post annealing produced Si clusters with average size of a few nanometers, on highly oriented pyrolytic graphite (HOPG) surfaces. This technique, which is based on surface diffusion, is limited to the production of less than one layer of clusters on a given surface. The low coverage of Si clusters and the possibility of nonradiative decay of excitation in the Si cores to the HOPG substrates in these samples rendered them unsuitable for many optical measurements. Thermal vaporization of Si in an Ar buffer gas, on the contrary, yielded multilayer coverage of Si nanoclusters with a fairly narrow size distribution of about 2 nm, full width at half maximum (FWHM). As a result, further study was performed only on Si nanoclusters synthesized by thermal vaporization in a buffer gas. High resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) revealed that these nanoclusters were crystalline. However, during synthesis, if oxygen was the buffer gas, a network of amorphous Si oxide nanostructures (an-SiO{sub x}) with occasional embedded Si dots was formed. All samples showed strong infrared and/or visible photoluminescence (PL) with varying decay times from nanoseconds to microseconds depending on synthesis conditions. There were differences in PL spectra for hydrogen and oxygen passivated nc-Si, while many common PL properties between oxygen passivated nc-Si and an SiO{sub x} were observed. The observed experimental results can be best explained by a model involving absorption between quantum confined states in the Si cores and emission for which the decay times are very sensitive to surface and/or interface states.